


The World Has Held Great Heroes

by gwyneth rhys (gwyneth)



Series: All They Had Lost [3]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Drift Bond, Fix-It of Sorts, Guilt, Kooky Kaiju Science, M/M, Reunions, Road Trips, Team Hot Dads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 17:00:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3389396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyneth/pseuds/gwyneth%20rhys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wounds Stacker suffered in the blast from Striker Eureka’s payload are healing. It’s the fact that Herc has never been here that really hurts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World Has Held Great Heroes

**Author's Note:**

> I stalled on the third part of this trilogy over a year ago, but it's finally complete! I think the first two stories could potentially be read as standalones, but this one would definitely make more sense if you've at least read part two of the series.
> 
> All titles in the series are from _The Wind in the Willows_. Don't ask me why.

Stacker wakes in a haze, the same way he always does now, a pearly grey-green mist of memory and pain that wraps around him like cotton-wool. He’s been in limbo for months, although he doesn’t know precisely how long it’s been because time bleeds into fluid suspension, broken only by Mako’s visits each day, the doctors who poke at him, and drift-visions from Chuck--with whom he’s still neurally connected in some trippy drugged-out half-space.

The only sense he can truly use is hearing; he can’t much feel, taste, see, or smell anything outside this new skin. So Mako makes use of that one sense, reading him news (the breach still sealed, the world slowly recovering, and her running the program with Tendo Choi), giving him his vitals (every day it’s better, but he’s still not out of the woods), and recounting how Chuck is progressing (much better than Stacker, but then, he started this a lot younger and healthier). Stacker also hears Doctors Lightcap and Geiszler explaining things to him, as if somehow he’d understand the technomedical-babble. 

But the one thing he never hears is the sound of Herc’s voice.

Mako pedals around it, and when Stacker finally figured out what she was doing, he realized that while he couldn’t speak or see, he could still use his fingers to write out an H on the bedclothes. She changed the subject as quickly as she could after telling him they were contacting Marshal Hansen, as if Herc was somewhere far off, and Stacker allowed her to leave it at that because he could sense her growing distress. Stacker knows she’d never outright lie to him, but she has odd notions of what protects him, and that’s what she’s dedicating herself to right now. Well, he asked her to protect him before he went into battle, so he can’t exactly complain about that now.

He hadn’t expected to have time with her again, though, to hear the sweet chime of her gentle voice, so he’ll continue to lie here in limbo, cooking under this new skin that’s healing him slowly from the outside in, and listen to her each day until someone inevitably drags her away and forces him back to sleep. Sometimes he allows the drift with Chuck to overtake him, swaddling himself in Chuck’s memories of Herc and Angela and a life that wasn’t Stacker’s own.

Being a science experiment is a humbling thing, particularly after the position he’d held for so long. All of the doctors here talk to him as if he’s a child, even Geiszler, who’s so enthusiastic and excitable about how this treatment is progressing that it would make Stacker groan if he weren’t intubated. 

He should be grateful, he knows--that so many of them came together to figure a way to save his and Chuck’s lives, that they have dedicated their own lives to resurrecting his, that they are clever enough to even conceive of this treatment. Most of all, to take a leap of faith with Geiszler’s research, the way he took one in drifting with a kaiju; the way Stacker himself had when someone said they should build giant robots to battle giant monsters. 

Yet all he can do is wonder about what they are actually trying to save and whether it’s worth it. Or if he’ll end up some kind of monster himself, reborn inside a skin made from cells of an alien creature. Stacker has his doubts, but there’s no one to confess them to except Chuck in some half-formed way, so he lies there, lost in the opal fog of drifts past. 

In his head sometimes he tells Herc his fears. One of his greatest strengths--there are so many, because Hercules Hansen lives up to his given name and is the strongest man Stacker’s ever met--was that he listened to people, really listened. Would he have heard the anxiety veiled within Stacker’s words? 

The wounds Stacker suffered in the blast from Striker Eureka’s payload are healing. It’s the fact that Herc has never been here that really hurts.

 

At the end, Chuck found out what it really meant to be a man, the kind his father is. He was satisfied with that, even though throwing that switch to arm the nuke wasn’t exactly _easy_. All those years he’d battled his demons, trying so hard not to be like his old man, knowing he could never measure up and lashing out because of that, and, well, what had it got him? Absolutely nothing--at least, nothing he’d wanted.

He’s thinking about that while they take off the first round of bandage-goop--second skin, Geiszler likes to call it--because he wants to be strong, even though he’s nearly pissing himself with terror. No one here knows what could happen if this shit made from kaiju cells and whatever other crap they poured into it has done something to him and the marshal somehow, maybe fucked up their DNA. Chuck doesn’t _feel_ different, at least for the most part; they’ve taken pieces of the skin off him here and there, but this--this is showtime.

He is different on the inside. Chuck grew up in those final moments, understood what his dad had sacrificed, what his mum would have chosen had she the chance, and made the hero’s call and died atoning for his sins. That’s what’s so weird now: he died, sort of, he was willing to die, but now he’s here and he’s alive and did his sacrifice mean anything to anyone but him?

They’re pulling away the skin and everyone’s talking, most of all Geiszler, who’s got verbal diarrhea at the best of times but he’s so amped up it’s crazy, and the sound of his voice is just. so. unpleasant. that Chuck wishes he could wrap his hands around the bloke’s throat and squeeze till his fucking eyes pop out. The excited murmurs, with first Dr. Lightcap’s voice and then the others whose names he can’t remember, get louder and they gasp as one. He doesn’t want to open his eyes. That’s the thing that’ll tell him whether the gasps are good or bad. 

More than anything, Chuck really, really wishes his dad was here. He aches to hear Herc’s voice, calming in its depth and authority, telling him it’ll be okay, telling him to be strong. Needs his comforting touch, that sturdy hand upon his shoulder. All these years he spent shrugging off his father’s touch, and now he needs it more than breath.

“Dude! DUDE!” Geiszler shouts in his face. “Why, Miss Hansen, you’re beautiful!” he bellows, and Chuck opens his eyes to see the bespectacled bug-face taking up all his vision. There’s still a tube in his throat so he can’t speak, but judging by the smiles as he slowly focuses, it must be good news. “Oh man, this is so great, so great, I can’t wait till we see what happened with the marshal. HA! I was totally, _totally_ right.” He’s irritatingly flicking lights in Chuck’s eyes, asking him about fingers, poking various body parts. 

Even this little has taken everything out of Chuck, and now he’s exhausted. He wants to go back to sleep and the gauzy drift-memories of him and Dad and Mum together, of his dad and the marshal and Mako, his second family that rose out of the ashes of their first ones.

His worst fear is that his father is dead, and no one will tell him so he doesn’t decide to check out after all their hard work. It’s not the most charitable thought, but he’s still Chuck Hansen, after all.

Before he can go back to sleep, though, Chuck motions at the tube, and everyone agrees it should come out. They probably want to know if he can speak as much as he does. While they bustle around, the tears come, unexpectedly and unreservedly. They spill down the sides of his head, and he can feel their coolness, the wet patches they leave on the pillow by his ears. He can _feel_ it on his skin, a thought that makes him cry all the more. He would give anything to have his father see him cry.

 

Even though it’s only been months, Hong Kong looks so different already. They wasted no time in rebuilding, and there is heavy militarization around the port. The helicopter lands on the platform Herc last stood on to throw his phone in the bay, where he looked out upon the water that held the last traces of his son and his friend.

When he steps out on the tarmac, Mako strides up to him, smiling, and bows. She’s wearing her combat boots and standard PPDC fatigues, still has the blue streaks in her hair, and she is the loveliest sight. He returns her bow and then embraces her, stroking her hair, whispering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” As he opens his eyes, he sees Raleigh Becket in the background, smiling, his head ducked, very much not in uniform. 

Mako pulls back and looks at him with unrelenting earnestness. “You should not apologize, Marshal. You did what you needed to for yourself. I’m only ashamed that we were not able to find you earlier.”

“I made that very difficult. And I’m not the marshal anymore; you don’t need to call me that.” She wraps both her hands around his, pulls him toward the shatterdome doors. Strands of blue hair flutter around her face in the wind. “Max?” he asks.

“He is in the medical unit. He sleeps at the foot of Charles’s bed.” She has always insisted on calling him Charles, partly because she thinks Chuck is a stupid name and partly because it annoys him. Her schoolgirl crush on him had worn off as she’d got older, and they’d become more like siblings who couldn’t be in the same room without bickering and quibbling for a number of years, until they both went into the academy. “The doctors did not like that, but we insisted. We thought it would help Charles to hear him.”

Raleigh swings up beside them as they enter. The feeling of coming back here, of knowing a purpose again, hits Herc in the gut, and he stops, catching his breath. Swallowing, he turns to Raleigh, because he can’t imagine what it must be like to watch someone else regain the thing they’d loved most in life and lost, knowing he could never have that himself.

But Raleigh just puts his hand out with a light touch on Herc’s forearm. “I think I know what you’re going to say. It’s okay. I’m just glad they’re alive.” Herc nods a couple times.

“Do they know I’m coming?” He’s almost scared to ask, because everyone has steadfastly avoided telling him Chuck and Stacker’s true condition and what’s happening. As if they didn’t want him to get his hopes up, or they didn’t want to frighten him, he’s not sure which. Maybe both.

Mako shoots Raleigh a look, which Herc catches. After weighing some thought for a bit, she finally says, “It’s best if you see things for yourself.”

The med ward has been transformed into part intensive care unit and part science laboratory. Chuck is on the right side, partially covered in something that looks like grey goop, but it also has a texture, integrity, and it shines fish-scale silvery in the xenon light. Most of his head is exposed, thankfully, and he’s sleeping, face turned toward the wall. Stacker is on the left side, completely covered in the skin, and Herc shudders at the sight of it. In between them are so many machines Herc can’t even count them with a quick glance.

He pulls a chair up next to Chuck, takes his hand, and strokes his forehead, which is cool and smooth. He can sense Mako and Raleigh behind him, slowly fading back out the sliding doors, and although there are some nursing staff moving about the space, he’s mostly alone with Chuck. Part of Chuck’s hand is patched with the skin-goop, but Herc leans on the bed with his elbows and holds the hand up against his cheek. “I wasn’t here for you. Maybe it was for the better, maybe you wouldn’t have wanted me here, but...I wish I’d been here for you. Always the story with me, eh? Never there for you when you need me most.” He covers Chuck’s hand with both of his, and rubs at the wetness his tears have left behind.

“I kept feeling this--as if something pulled at me from the drift, so I went away to shake it off. It was like watching someone fade from your rearview mirror when you drive away, but you never quite left my sight.”

Slowly Chuck turns toward the sound of Herc’s voice, a smug smile playing on his lips. He opens his bloodshot, weary eyes, and says, “Dad.” All the years behaving like strangers instead of father and son, all that unhappiness and pain and confusion fades away as Herc is flooded with a shimmering warmth. “You’re really here.”

“I’m here now. I’m really here.” He’d dreamed of being reunited with Angela for years after she’d died, some kind of fantasy where she wasn’t really killed in the attacks, where it just took time to find each other again in the chaos. This was what it was like then to be reunited with someone you’d lost, here, right beneath his hands. His son, alive again. Herc’s heart beats differently than it has all these months alone, he can breathe again. He can mend.

Chuck closes his eyes again, but he clutches Herc’s hand tightly as he falls back asleep. In a few minutes Herc’ll get up and go over to Stacker’s bed, but right now, Herc just wants to look at Chuck, hold him as close as he can. 

After a minute his reunion is shattered when he hears the unmistakable voice of Newton Geiszler. “Wow, hey, look, it’s the runaway marshal.”

His shoulders sag, but he notices Chuck smile before he gets up and turns. Behind Geiszler is Dr. Lightcap, whom he hasn’t seen in years, and a few other faces he doesn’t recognize. 

“Herc, I’m so glad you’re back,” Caitlin says to him, and takes him in a hug. 

He runs a hand over his head, glances at Stacker, and says, “Do you think you could tell me what’s going on?”

 

Stacker was dreaming Chuck’s dreams again: he was little, being comforted by his mum. He’d been bullied at school, hurt by someone, and Angela tended to his wounds while Herc soothed him, told Chuck he’d teach him how to make it stop. Told him it was going to be okay, and Chuck believed him, because Herc’s is a voice you always believe... But gradually Stacker realizes it’s actually Herc’s voice here in the room, right now, telling Chuck it’ll be okay. Stacker’s breath is shallow, his heart pounds, but then everything’s cut off abruptly by the abrasive sound of Geiszler.

“And then I realized it was, like, I could cure cancer! This isn’t just groundbreaking research, I mean, this changes the whole game. I know there’s a million different cancers, but at least these are some we know we can do something about.”

It _is_ Herc’s voice, it’s not just a drift-dream, because Stacker hears Herc say acidly, “Make sure you get a patent on that.”

Stacker smiles inside, knowing what Herc’s face must look like, how little patience he had for people who talked so much. He’d always preferred to let deeds do the talking. Sure, he listened to every word you said, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want you to actually stop talking and fucking get on with it. And yet Newton had brought his son back to him, so he would be more generous with his tolerance. Stacker would give anything to see his face right now.

“Oh, I’m gonna patent the _fuck_ out of this! All these years enduring everyone I know giving me shit about being a kaiju lover and a kaiju groupie and now I get the last laugh, because I can use their cells to bring people back from the brink of death. Take that, bitches! Ha!”

Herc’s voice is muffled when he speaks again, and Stacker pictures him in his mind, his hands over his face, rubbing his forehead and trying to tamp down his impatience. “How can you know this is safe?”

“We can’t! Any more than I knew it was safe to drift with a kaiju, but you wouldn’t have closed the breach if I hadn’t done that. Huh? Right? That’s kind of the beauty of it, I mean, it’s not like you get human test subjects for something like this--uh, that came out wrong. I mean, we could have done nothing, or we could have taken a risk and done this. And anyways, I’ve synthesized the properties of the cells, so it’s not like they’re gonna suddenly develop kaiju blue or slimy skin or whatever. I think.”

Herc’s muffled groan brings a wave of sympathy to Stacker, washing over him, making him laugh behind his cocoon. “What about Stacker? Can I talk to him?”

Caitlin Lightcap’s voice comes through next, and she says, “Of course. We’ll leave you alone. One thing you should know--we had a pons rigged up so that he and Chuck could remain neurally connected; we thought it might help in the healing process. It seems to have, but they were recently disconnected. We’re thinking we may take more of the second skin off him later today, based on Chuck’s comments about what he saw and felt during the connection. He’s going to be very tired, and it might be really hard on him emotionally.”

That is very good news to Stacker, though. He shifts in the bed and reaches out to tap the bedrail a couple times, and then his hand is being clasped, Herc’s saying in his ear, “Stacks.” It just takes his name from Herc’s lips to tell him that everything will be all right now.

 

The skin that covers Stacker is slightly opaque, just enough that Herc can’t see detail but he can see Stacker’s face beneath it; it looks different than it did on Chuck, which Herc thinks might simply be the difference between Stacker’s dark skin and Chuck’s light. 

A river of emotion runs swiftly through Herc’s soul, churning, twisting, pulling reason with it. Stacker’s grip is tight in his, as if he’s holding on while they ride the current together, and underneath the noise of the breathing tube, the rapids crash. 

Though Herc’s uncertain if he should touch this strange shell encasing Stacker, he holds tight to the hand, glides his fingers along the side of Stacker’s face. “I never would have left if I’d known you were really alive. I made my apologies to Chuck and I need to make them to you, too. It was just-- There wasn’t anything left in me, like I was running on sorrow. I didn’t know what else to do but keep going until I couldn’t anymore.”

Stacker squeezes tighter in response. Herc knew he’d understand, but that doesn’t make his failure to be here any easier to acknowledge. 

Herc runs his hand over Stacker’s head. “Do you remember after you found me at the base, and I was just sitting there on that cot, completely lost, and you knelt down and told me so gently that Angela was gone? How you came with me when I drove out to the desert, and we sat there with our whiskey and watched the stars and drank to our lost girls?” 

Stacks gives a nod so slight it’s almost imperceptible, covered as it is in that strange skin. “I’d been on the fence about joining up with the PPDC, but that was when I knew I had to. That you were my friend and always would be. The fire was lit, and I wanted to fight beside you. Wherever you chose to go, I would follow. But in the end, with both of you somewhere I couldn’t follow, there was just nothing for me to give any more. I gave them my son, I gave them my best mate. I was done.”

A thought comes through the aether to him, enters his mind like a sliver piercing flesh. Stacker’s voice, drift-fragmented but clear: //guess I didn’t want to leave a world with you in it//

Herc laughs, he actually laughs for the first time in so long it’s as if the sound comes from someone else entirely. “And I didn’t want to keep living in the world you weren’t in.” He holds Stacker’s hand against his chest. “Let’s just plan to live forever, all right? Solve all our problems that way.”

 

“Look at you, with the standing up and everything!” Newt says, and Chuck turns from the railing of the helo landing pad.

“And I can turn right,” Chuck says as he turns stiffly to the side, smiling at his father, who he spots trailing behind Newt. “It’s a bigger deal than it sounds,” he adds with a self-deprecating shrug.

“No, man, I know. I know! Not only did all your ridiculously pumped-up muscles atrophy, but you had _so many_ internal and external injuries. Using your fine motor skills and turning and making your limbs do what you want them to is _huge_. I mean, I’m not a medical doctor or whatever, but I know this is a pretty spectacular comeback.” 

As friendly as he and Newt have become, Chuck can tell there’s an unstated “which I am responsible for” in there. It amuses Chuck, the way Newt’s mind works--overworks, most of the time--as his confidence in his own genius battles against his social anxieties. Honestly, Chuck can see a little of himself in Newt, the arrogance that masks crippling self-doubt, the abrasiveness that comes from not really knowing how to be around people who weren’t even in the same league as you. 

The wind’s bracing out here, but he relishes it, loves being outside the dome as much as they’ll allow him now that he can stand and walk for short periods of time. He’ll stare out at the bay, skin tingling in the crisp air, smelling the briny water, taking in the colors of the boats in the harbor. After months encased in the goo, the freedom to move around, even in a wheelchair most of the time, is the most precious gift he could have had. Well, second most, because his dad’s here and they’re all alive. Nothing beats that.

Newt doesn’t have time to see him as much these days, now that the second-skin experiment has proven to work and Chuck’s returning to some kind of normal life. But he still checks on him regularly, because no one’s certain what being exposed to kaiju cells, even synthesized ones, will do to a human body. Confident as he is, Newt can’t know for certain there won’t be some kind of effect beyond the fact of healing him and Pentecost. But Chuck’s okay with that--he’s got time he didn’t expect to have, after all. If he turns into a monster and they have to put him down, well. It’s a fair trade.

When they’d first explained what had happened to him, in the depths of his incapacity, he’d completely lost his shit, flailing and lashing out, weak as he was. He’d known people used stuff made from kaijus before--he’d seen the adverts extolling the uses of bone powder and blood cells, just like everyone else--but it was more than a little disgusting to think that you were covered in goo that contained kaiju skin, whatever had caused its toxic blue glow fusing with your own body, almost like a womb. 

So he is grateful that Newt persevered, flying in the face of everyone’s skepticism, and standing firm even when Chuck protested with what little ability he’d had. Because now he can stand here once again, can see his dad’s face light up at the sight of him, every single day, and be amazed by life in a way he hasn’t since he was a little kid.

Newt pulls his eyelids up, checks his eyes with a light, looks in his mouth like he always does--Chuck never asks why, since that’s just weird enough that he figures the explanation will be too creepy to handle--and thumps him on the chest. “A fine specimen of Australian beef, as usual,” Newt says. “Your dad came into the med bay and I told him you were out here.” He glances back and forth between them, because he knows about the issues they used to have, and even though he and Newt are friendly, some areas have stayed undiscussed. Chuck sometimes thinks Newt’s scared of his dad. “Just so we’re clear, I don’t give you permission yet to go running around on your own, dude. If you were a Jaeger, I’d say you were at, like, twenty-five percent capacity. You’re a ninety-eight pound weakling. In kilograms that’s forty-four point four-five two zero something. Never mind. It’s an American thing. I’ll explain later.” Newt squeezes his biceps and makes a swoony face. “Still, I’d let you take me in a manly fashion.”

“Thanks, mate,” Chuck says, and pats Newt’s hand while disengaging it from his arm. His father silently slides his hands under Chuck’s elbows with fatherly concern, guiding him to the wheelchair, which Chuck gratefully takes. He doesn’t know how long it’ll take to get back to full strength, but he’ll keep going to physio, doing everything they tell him to do--this time, he’s not going to fight anyone or piss anyone off just for the simple human act of showing him care. 

Newt waves at him and ambles off to the shatterdome, no doubt to check in with the marshal, because he’s beside himself with glee over Pentecost’s progress--not to say how likely he is to get a Nobel prize out of all this. Even Gottlieb thinks this is world-changing shit, so their perpetual feud has died down considerably; Gottlieb will probably get his own Nobel, and the two of them are actually collaborating on papers and speeches and video presentations. Chuck’s not entirely certain, but he thinks they might be involved with each other, and more power to them if they are, since it’d be nice if someone, somewhere got something out of this shitty war besides sorrow. That’s the thing that gets to him every time--how his father and the marshal found each other, how Mako and Raleigh did, too, and the fact there is love in this grimy, dark world means it wasn’t all for nothing. As he gets in the chair, Herc drapes his Lucky 7 jacket over Chuck’s shoulders, smooths a hand over his hair.

Herc’s never said anything about how much his son has changed, but then, he doesn’t really need to. His dad had never been a chatty guy, but his feelings are written all over his face--pride, relief, love. It had taken some time to convince his dad that he bore no grudge for his absence when they were pulled from the ocean; Chuck understood Herc’s misery, how deeply he’d grieved, the compelling need to take himself away. For years he’d watched exactly that in the drift, an agonizing instant replay as the loss of Chuck’s mum destroyed his father and how that had translated to his absent parenting. Those were images he’d never been able to admit into his emotional landscape, though, when it was so much simpler to just let seething rage rule his life. Now he sees the strength in his dad, the courage he’d shown by just fucking _keeping on_ , by doing a job that needed doing, and Chuck knows the same pride Herc feels. No one ever got do-overs in life, except, somehow, he and the marshal had. You didn’t have to be a genius to know not to waste such a rare gift.

They make their way slowly back to the med bay, where they’ll probably play chess for a little while until Chuck reaches his fatigue threshold. Their days are spent healing, him and Pentecost, him and his dad. Herc has responsibilities running the shatterdome, interfacing with the new PPDC now that the Wall of Life fuckwits have all been given the boot. No one really knows what to expect of the future, if they are really done with the kaiju war or if it’s just a lull, so Herc, as acting marshal, attends all the conferences by video, because he’s made it clear he’s not leaving his son’s side. Chuck sort of revels in having his dad fuss over him and treat him like a vulnerable little kid. Sometimes when he’s falling asleep, Herc’s hand rests on the side of his face and neck, stroking gently, and he remembers being a little boy, enveloped by his parents’ love, just so.

Herc’s protected him from the cameras and the reporters, but at some point he’ll be ready to go out there with his public face on. He used to enjoy it, but Chuck wonders how people will react, if by not actually dying his efforts will seem unheroic. Or if people will treat him with revulsion, having been saved by kaiju science. But he figures that as long as his dad is here with him, it’ll be okay. If people do still see him as a great hero, it’s only because he’s his father’s son.

 

“You have to stop beating yourself up for it,” Stacker says to Herc, inching himself up on the bed, huffing and puffing from the effort. “Any normal person would have broken under a lot less. You took yourself off before you could break.”

Stacker’s always wanted to believe that Herc is the stronger of them, that Herc’s the bravest man on the field. But it didn’t take any courage to walk away; it was the opposite of courage. Each day now, Herc wakes thinking that it’s the end of the world, and then gradually remembers that they have somehow been granted a reprieve. That his son and Stacker are alive and there is a future, however uncertain. 

“You always think the best of me.”

“Because you’ve proven who you are again and again.”

He thinks about his time in Central America, how far away he was from the man Stacker knew, how desperately he needed to not be that man. And he is still at a loss even here and now, playacting at running the show when all he really wants to do is sit here each day with Chuck and Stacker, living a life that doesn’t require fighting something. 

“I can’t wait till you’re well enough to take over again. I’m sick of interviews and meetings and cameras. Fucking hell, I hate meetings.”

“I don’t know that I want to get well enough to do that again,” Stacker says, laughing. “Sort of enjoying being an invalid.”

Herc narrows his eyes and mock-frowns. “Bullshit.” Stacker was born to be a leader, to always drive forward and do things that made a difference in the world. Willing to take the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Stacker shrugs and reaches a hand out, twining his fingers through Herc’s. One side-effect of the second skin was that all Stacker’s drivesuit scars are gone now, his tattoos faded to near invisibility. Herc misses them, but he’s more than happy to trade their loss for Stacker’s life. 

They have always been comfortable in silence with each other, even before they’d drifted, so just sitting here, being in each others’ presence, is usually enough, now that Stacker is returning to normal. But Herc sees something inchoate underneath his ease and relaxation, something rubbing Stacker’s mind raw, unacknowledged though it may be. 

“Mako says you’re going to New York, to the new council meeting with the UN.” 

“Yeah, I tried to get out of it, fucking hell did I try to get out of it. But with you out...” Herc scrunches up his face, which makes Stacker smile. It never fails to amuse Stacker how much disdain Herc has for suits, and Stacker loves to provoke him with it, watch the color rise in his cheeks and his eyes spark. “I couldn’t even play the ‘my son was just brought back from the dead’ card successfully. At least Tendo and Miss Mori are going with me.”

“I’m glad.” But the smile slides from Stacker’s face, his mask of happiness cracking as he lets down his guard, something only Herc is privileged to see. 

“What is it?” Herc asks, because for the first time since they became lovers, he can’t read Stacks, doesn’t fully understand what’s going on inside him. 

“Gonna miss you, is all,” Stacker says half-heartedly, and Herc grips his hand tighter, too tight as Stacker winces. 

Closing his eyes, Herc sighs raggedly, a tremble moving slowly up his arms, into his chest, his heart constricting. He had moments like this in Central America, small anxiety attacks that sometimes blew up into full-blown immobilization, and he breathes against it, hoping he won’t lose it in front of Stacker. “There’s nothing you could say that would make me feel any worse than I already do about not being here for you.” He opens his eyes again and stares at him.

“That’s not what I--”

“Of course it is.” 

Stacker just shakes his head at that and pulls his hand away, or tries to at least, because Herc doesn’t let go. So he turns his eyes toward the window and leans back into the pillows. “I coded multiple times the first few weeks. Even once they’d decided to try Geiszler’s idea, they couldn’t keep me stable. It was Caitlin’s idea to rig up a neural bridge between me and Chuck to see if it would help stabilize me. And it did, since we were still connected when we jettisoned.”

Herc wonders what kinds of things Stacker would have seen in that drift, how much pain and confusion was there, moving back and forth between him and Chuck like a dark wave. Well, he’d wondered for a long time what each of them would have seen from the other in that final drift, how their histories with Herc and their emotions would have affected the connective process. Stacker had always been a bit smug about how little he brought into the drift, but he still brought something--and Chuck had been nothing but one giant open wound then.

“He’s so strong, that lad. But it was like an echo, bouncing around in both our heads, getting louder and louder the longer we were connected, because there was a hollowness without your voice here. There was so much pain at first. So much to endure. And I kept thinking I could stand it all if you were here.”

Tears sting behind Herc’s eyes, he looks down at their hands entwined, his skin hot with shame. He licks his lips, mouth suddenly as dry as the Great Victoria Desert. “You never go into something like this thinking that it’ll be the ones you love who sacrifice. You go into it thinking that it’ll be you doing the sacrificing. That’s who we are, we soldiers. We risk ourselves. I was never prepared to be the last one living. To watch my son walk into death, to watch the man I love leave with him.”

Stacker suddenly pulls on his arm, drags him onto the bed next to him, and puts his forehead against Herc’s, bumps his fist a couple times on Herc’s forearm. “I couldn’t hear your voice.”

Herc puts his hand on the back of Stacker’s neck, stroking his thumb along his skin. “I was so broken inside, so bitter. They searched for days, because I kept thinking...” He kisses Stacker’s lips, his cheek, his temple. “I thought I heard you and Chuck. That you were telling me you were out there, but everyone believed I was mad.” Stacker sighs against his mouth. He must be so tired now, all these emotions swirling around them, but it’s been building for weeks and they may as well have it out. “I went as far off the grid as I could, just trying to put one foot in front of the other, step through each day. If I’d known...”

“We’re all right now,” Stacker says, and smiles against his lips. 

“I would never have let you down like that if I’d known.”

“It’s safe to say this was not the expected outcome.” Stacker runs his fingers up and down Herc’s arm, and Herc breathes out a laugh.

“I’ll come back this time. You’re stuck with me for good, yeah? With you till the end.”

“Yeah,” Stacker says, and they look at each other, grinning. They will be all right, they will be. “Look at us. What bloody great heroes we are.”

 

When Herc returns from New York, he and Mako are both wired from the long flight and the disruption to their body clocks, so they look in first on Stacker, who’s not sleeping. Mako gets him up and into the wheelchair; then they wake up Chuck, who’s now moved into his own quarters. It’s quiet late at night, with so many personnel having been furloughed for the time being until they know exactly what’s going to happen with the program, and it’s ghostly in the shatterdome. Chuck laughingly slaps away Herc’s hands as he tries to help Chuck walk with the cane he’s using now, and they all go find Raleigh. Meeting up with Tendo, they convene around a table in the mess, where Herc pulls out a couple bottles of Glemorangie and Mako breaks out the real glasses.

At first no one talks much, they just toast Cherno and Typhoon and Yancy. Herc watches Chuck, admiring how relaxed and pleased he seems to be. There’s no friction left between him and Raleigh. Where was the boy who started fights with other pilots, who disappeared for days into the roadless desert after a kill, who railed against a world he thought was his enemy? In his place now is a young man with kindness in his eyes and an easy camaraderie with everyone else.

Eventually Mako texts Gottlieb and Geiszler and they show up after a few minutes, both of them bed-headed and bleary-eyed. Newt seems to know better than to talk at his usual volume and speed, just grins excitedly at the whiskey and smiles at Hermann like it’s Christmas morning. 

After some time spent simply enjoying everyone’s presence, Herc tells them about the decisions of the council and the UN: that no one knows whether the aliens will come back, so they feel it’s “best to prepare ourselves and reinvest in the program.” Stacker nods sagely, as if he’s expected just that. Herc’s often believed the aliens won’t come back, that they hadn’t expected a fight and would just as soon move on to someplace they could deal with more easily. But Mako and a lot of other people are in the camp that believes they may try again, that those category five kaijus were proof the aliens would keep going until humans couldn’t anymore.

When Herc’s finished, they look at each other around the table, smiling, acknowledging everything they’ve seen, everything they’ve lost. Chuck raises his glass, nods at Stacker, and says, “To the scientists who saved our lives, in more ways than one.” Newt and Hermann beam at him, and everyone toasts. Then Hermann says in return, “To the great heroes who fought our battles. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.”

And they drink some more, which makes the stories and the jokes and the laughter flow. At one point Chuck catches his eye, smiles at him, and nods. If this was the new world order, he’d take it.

 

“And then there’s this bloke! Christ, what does he want, a written invitation? He’s had that bloody signal on for ten klicks!” Herc is bellowing at the car in the next lane ahead of them, or bellowing at Stacker, he’s not sure which.

Stacker leans back against the headrest, closes his eyes because he can’t really stand to watch this spectacle of mad driving and hostility, and says, “Nothing to remind you you’re alive again like a little old-fashioned road rage.”

It wouldn’t take opening his eyes to know that Herc is trying not to laugh. “I mean, I’ve given him plenty of opportunity to move the fuck over.” His voice is apologetic but amused.

“Mmm-hmm.”

This time Herc loses it completely and that warm, rich, sexy laugh pours out. “All right, all right. I’m a colossal dick.”

They’ve been on the road for a few days, just driving around the western United States, Herc showing Stacker some of the places he’d been on his sojourn. He’s watched the tension easing from Herc’s shoulders, heard the tightness in his voice vanish, and for that Stacker’s pretty grateful.

It’s all spectacularly beautiful here, and they’re inland and safe, so far away from the dangers of the Pacific Ocean that the events of the past few decades seem to have belonged more to a terrible action movie than their real lives, but Stacker still feels a gnawing dread in the pit of his stomach. He’s been given a clean bill of health from every type of doctor under the sun, there are more monitors and sensors to keep track of his health than either of them know what to do with, and he’s cancer-free, yet somehow he feels like the walking dead right now. 

After stopping for lunch and then finding a motel room, they pack up enough supplies to head out into the Painted Desert to catch the sunset and do a little night photography, a former hobby Herc has resumed once Stacker had returned to light duty. Stacker is strong now--certainly a lot stronger than he’d been the last two years of his life--but Herc tends to baby him, overly solicitous about pretty much everything and it rankles him in the extreme. Not that being irritated had stopped them from having bed-breaking sex in most of the places they’d stayed in. 

Out here, not far past the Petrified Forest, you realize just how short of a blip humans have made on the timeline. When these orange, red, pink, and lavender hills had been carved out, dinosaurs were lumbering around. Humans were just...cosmic dust still, and that whirls around in Stacker’s brain and makes his head swim. Fucking hell.

His chest constricts, breath becoming shallow and weak, and he can sense something crawling up through his skin, as if this new outer layer he’s been given will expand and split and his insides will explode out. They’re in the middle of nowhere, on a road that’s little more than a thin dirt track, but Stacker snaps out, “Stop the fucking car,” and starts to open the door before Herc can even process what he’s saying. Herc slams on the brakes and they skid sideways in a billowing cloud of dust, while Stacker frantically claws his way out of the SUV to dry-heave up against the wheel-well. 

The sun is setting now, its rosy fingers clutching at the twilit ceiling of sky, but Stacker can’t really do much of anything except stare at the red dust on the tires, wait for the spasms in his gut to cease. Herc stands behind him, knowing not to ask if he’s all right, just waiting it out with him. When he thinks it’s finally stopped, he leans back against the side of the car and wipes at his mouth. There wasn’t much to come up, just water mostly, but it still feels disgusting so he scrubs at his face with the back of his hand, realizing there are tear tracks on the sides of his cheeks. He still can’t breathe, he’s gulping in air and his limbs shake, but at least he’s quelled the need to vomit.

“I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m still alive.” It’s a chant of confusion, of fear. Maybe even of denial. How is he alive, how? He was dead, and then he wasn’t, and he’s not sure he wants to be alive, he’s not sure he wants to _be_. And yet he’s never been more alive than he is right now, more present. “Fucking hell, I’m still living. Fuck.”

“You are most certainly that.” Herc sits down next to him and draws his knees up just like Stacker, arms dangling, and they sit there for a good long time, watching the sun fall down behind the hills and the stars begin winking in the sky. 

“What the hell.” It’s about all Stacker can muster. He stares at Herc in the dusk, trying to find the thread that had connected them for all these years somewhere in the shadows of Herc’s perfect face. “I couldn’t--”

Herc waves his hand. “You don’t owe me any explanations. I’ve had a few bad moments after Pitfall myself.” He opens the back door, rummages around, and then pulls out a water bottle and hands it to Stacker.

“How am I here, H? How am I alive? I was dead. I was supposed to be dead.”

“I don’t know. I’d think this beats the alternative, myself. But maybe that’s not what you wanted.”

Stacker snorts. “I’d made my peace with things a long time ago. The cancer, all of it, Luna and Tamsin and...” Or at least he’d told himself he had. Herc’s silence makes him wonder if he’d been fooling himself all along.

“I was thinking about this place. That it was being formed when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and then...thinking about what Geiszler said, about the kaiju being here back then.” He swishes his mouth with water and spits it out. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

“Usually that's what survivors say about themselves after they’ve lost someone.” Herc runs his pale hand over Stacker’s head, rubs his thumb on his temple in soothing circular motions.

“Fucking hell, I love you,” Stacker says, the affection surging through him and taking his breath away. 

Herc laughs, that gorgeous, soft-scratchy voice of his that always leaves Stacker feeling hot and legless. “Tosser. You drop statements like that in at the most inconvenient moments, and how am I supposed to react.” He pulls Stacker’s head onto his shoulder and throws his arm around him. They stay there until the last of the color leaks from the sky. “You’re not thinking of checking out on me, are you?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I was a ghost, walking through it all. Kept wondering, is it suicide if you don’t care if you die, aren’t worried about your bike hitting that patch of ice and you’re sliding toward the edge of the bridge, or the plane’s engine conking out seems like...relief?”

Stacker nods and glides his hand along Herc’s strong jaw. He has new tattoos, new scars from fighting, and at night they lie in bed while Stacker reads his skin’s recent history with fingertips and mouth. Now Stacker traces the words that peek out above the collar of Herc’s shirt and leans over to kiss them. 

The stars above them have watched the oceans open up and bring forth monsters before, countless worlds destroyed and abandoned. How many have fought back as we did, he wonders? Our time was up, and then it wasn’t; Stacker’s time was up, and then it wasn’t. He’d never been inclined to ponder these things before, but lately it’s taken up residence in his brain and won’t vacate. There’s a line in a poem he remembers, nothing else about the poem, not even the name, just the one line: I empty myself of my life and my life remains. 

Herc kisses his mouth and runs his fingers along Stacker’s lips. In his eyes are those ancient stars, reflected, and Stacker feels the drift-thread pull taut between them.

“We'll be all right, won’t we?” Stacker says, and kisses Herc again. Once, long ago, he’d thought he’d emptied himself of love, before he met Herc, before he met Mako. But look, here and now, his love remains. 

“Yes,” Herc says with such tenderness Stacker’s heart pounds. “We will.”

Stacker believes him.


End file.
